Iraqi children are worse off today than they were before the US-led March 2003 invasion, Dan Toole, director of emergency programs for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), told reporters in Geneva on July 16.
"Children today are much worse off than they were a year ago, and they certainly are worse off than they were three years ago", Toole said. "Nutritional indicators, health access indicators are all changing for the worse."
Toole said that this was in large part due to Iraqis no longer having access to a government-funded basket of foodstuffs that was established under the regime of President Saddam Hussein in 1991. The system was designed to meet the basic needs of Iraqi citizens in the face of crippling international economic sanctions.
Apart from shortages of items such as milk and baby milk formula, "the basic Iraqi food basket was fairly secure under the [Baathist] regime because there was food coming in and the government provided the food basket to its citizens", Toole said.
As part of meeting Washington's objective of replacing the ousted regime's heavily public-sector dominated economy with a "free market" economy dominated by US and other foreign corporations, the US-backed Iraqi government began cutting the food ration budget in 2006.
As a direct result of the 1990-2003 economic sanctions, Iraq's under-five child morality rate doubled in the 1990s. In 1999, UNICEF estimated that "if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998".
The sanctions regime ended in May 2003, but most of Iraq's 26 million people remained dependent upon the government food rationing system. In May 2006, the last time the UN World Food Program — which took over administration of the Iraqi food rationing system after the US-led invasion — compiled statistics on the system, it reported that almost one-third of Iraqis would be at risk of hunger if they didn't receive daily food rations.
"Local agricultural production is almost nil", Majid al Dulaymi from the Iraq agriculture ministry told the Inter-Press Service news agency earlier this year. This has been the outcome of the decision by the US-led occupation authority to slash tariffs on imports of foreign goods, making it impossible for Iraqi farmers to compete with food imports, driving many of them bankrupt.
"The limited loans given by the ministry to farmers and planters", Dulaymi added, "are misused simply because it is not possible to maintain the agriculture production for reasons well known to everybody here. Now the private sector is importing everything, and the prices are too high to afford."
As well as cutting the food ration, Washington's puppet Iraqi government has also removed subsidies on a range of basic food items, leading dramatic rises in the prices Iraqis have to pay for them.
IPS reported on February 27 that a trade ministry official said that only sugar, rice, flour and cooking oil remained from the original 12 foodstuffs provided by the food ration under the Baathist government. Most of the other items were removed from the list in May 2006 as a result of budget cuts.
"What food ration are you talking about", 35-year-old Um Jamila, a mother of five complained to IPS. "The whole country has been stolen from us. If this goes on another six months, we will be just like any starving country."